TITLE: XFree86 4.2.99.x for the Brave and/or Foolish
LFS VERSION: 4.0
AUTHOR: Dagmar d'Surreal
EMAIL ADDRESS: Thou shalt not spam.
SYNOPSIS: This hint explains how to obtain and install a beta-release
copy of XFree86 from CVS.
EXPIRES: 2003-3-15
HINT:
* * * First, a word of friendly advice * * *
As with all software classified as being in BETA release, installation of
the software packages mentioned in this document is _not_ meant to be used
in a production environment, _nor_ is it meant for the weak of heart, _nor_
is it meant for beginners. Attempting to follow the instructions contained
herein unsuccessfully could possibly render your system *unuseable*,
and the author of this document will not be responsible for it. This
upgrade should not under any circumstances be considered a trivial matter.
You should carefully read this _entire_ document before following _any_ of
the instructions listed here. Changes of this nature may not be easily
reversible!
If you happen to be a newbie, or even still smell like a newbie, you should
probably wait for the public release of XFree86 4.3.0 which is being
promised us Real Soon Now and search for a more formal set of instructions
then. The only thing this document contains for you is forewarning about
what changes might be necessary at that future date.
* * * Now, on to something more informative * * *
Changelog
---------
2003-Feb-17, Updated Appendix B with new libxml version
Removed reference to old Bison dependency (yay!)
Updated information about the "core" cursor theme
Pushed forward the expiry since the XFree86 team did same
Clarified reasons for Freetype2 symlinks in /usr/X11R6
Acronym cleanups
Overview
--------
I. Changes from 4.2.x
II. Quick List of Prerequisites
III. Obtaining the XFree86 Sources
IV. Configuring the Build
V. Compiling the Binaries
VI. Installing
VII. Configuration
VIII. Extra Information
Appendices
A - Zlib Compression Library
B - Libxml2 Library
C - PNG Graphics Library
D - Expat Library
E - Freetype2 Library
I. Changes from 4.2.x
---------------------
XFree86 4.3.0 is a pretty sizeable change from 4.2.1 releases. There are
better places (by far) to get a complete list of the changes, but the ones
that will be most immediately noticeable to us will be the colored cursor
changes, no longer having to build an external program to install one's own
TrueType fonts, and the lack of the expected Xft configuration file.
The last item in that list is a lot more dangerous than it would at first
seem to be.
The colored cursor changes are a nice feature which hasn't quite finished
cooking yet at the time of this writing. The code itself appears to do
everything that it is supposed to do, however, the cursors themselves may
annoy you. The default theme for the new cursors is called "redglass" and
your only other option at this time is called "whiteglass". Although I have
been hearing a lot of complaints that redglass is ugly, whiteglass isn't much
of an option because somehow the PNG images of it that were used to make the
cursor files got a little broken, and some of the cursors have vertical lines
sliced out of them. If you see this on your screen, now at least you'll know
it's not a hardware issue. I'm sure this will be fixed in time for the final
release (although they'll probably still be ugly--get cracking Gimp fiends!).
It's not known whether or not the nVidia drivers (certainly more likely than
the ATI ones) will work with this release, but if you enabled the hardware
accellerated cursor shadow in your config, you'll probably want to go and
turn it off. The shadows on these pointers are part of the image and not
removeable. Two of them might look pretty weird.
A quick rundown on how you now go about installing TrueType fonts can be
covered in just three steps, provided you already have a directory named
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType on your system. First, install the font
file into that directory to make it accessible to everyone. Second, in that
directory, run `mkfontscale`. Thirdly, run `mkfontdir` as usual. There
no more mucking around with running `xftcache` or `xset fp rehash` with this
release and this is a good thing. By the way, I mentioned TrueType/ as the
place to install ttf fonts because /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF appears to be
a special directory used by XFree86 which is always searched for fonts, and
is set up when X is installed. If you never mess with this directory, it
and the fonts in it will always work, and nothing you do in the TrueType/
directory will be as likely to bring your display to an unreadable state.
The changes to the font system are, to my knowledge, one of the more wide-
sweeping changes for the 4.3.x release. Some new default TTF font families
with strange names have been added, and Xft has been replaced with a newer
version that might have been called Xft2 if not for the fact that it looks
like instead they're going to call the old one Xft1 and the new one just Xft.
I know that seems confusing, and you should expect it to be confusing for
a while yet until they get all the kinks out. Xft2 is not totally compatible
with Xft1, either, so expect packages to build against one or the other, but
not both. The minor unpleasantness is that because of this, if you use
anything that links to or uses libXft, you'll likely have to upgrade it
to the next beta release of whatever it was anyway (this includes Pango and
Gnome!). For the time being, however, it all seems binary-compatible enough
to not fall over and die when you upgrade X, but you might not be able to
compile new things that expect the old versions of Xft around. (This might
not be entirely correct, since I had some fontconfig problems, but I haven't
yet seen evidence to confirm this one way or the other. This is not something
you should spend more than 60 seconds worrying about tho'.)
II. Quick List of Pre-requisites
--------------------------------
This release of XFree86, presumably being more advanced than previous
versions, has a slightly larger number of things that should be installed
before you attempt to compile it. Mercifully, this release isn't hampered by
ancient Bison syntax, so it doesn't really matter which version of Bison you
have installed.
The thing you will definitely need is CVS. The XFree86 page mentions a
utility called CVSup which you should avoid like the plague. It'll only take
a moment to install cvs if you don't already have it, and it requires no
knowledge or finesse to use. Once tarballs are released you won't need this
anymore.
Like previous versions of XFree86, you will need to have shared library
versions of Freetype2 and zlib installed on the system. Unlike previous
versions, this version also needs libpng, expat, and possibly libxml2 as well.
Libpng and Freetype2 may require additional attention on your part, so in the
appendices you'll find careful documentation explaining how those two should
be compiled to ensure they'll work.
III. Obtaining the XFree86 Sources
----------------------------------
There are _no_ tarballs of the beta. I'll save you a *huge* amount of time
by giving you another warning _against_ attempting to build CVSup for use in
obtaining the source as the XFree86.org site mentions. Just use plain old
cvs to get the source unless you _already_ have CVSup (and Modula-3) on your
system and working. Building Modula-3 and CVSup can make compiling the JRE
look easy.
Not only will I tell you to use cvs, I'll give you the commands you use...
CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.xfree86.org:/cvs
export CVSROOT
cvs login
cvs -z3 checkout -A xc
...if you stick #!/bin/sh in front of that, it's a perfectly useable shell
script. Now find yourself a directory with about 700Mb of space free in it,
and run that puppy. Enter "anoncvs" for the password and _wait_.
Sometimes it takes cvs awhile to get going, particularly with massive trees
of source code. You should be seeing some crazy network activity already.
I was not joking about the 700Mb of space. Fully 350Mb of that will be
source code, and it will need the rest of the space to compile. The good
news is that the completed binaries will take up about the same amount of
space on your system as the previous version of XFree86 did. After much
time has passed, you'll have a fresh set of sources to work from.
If you have any doubts about your compiler or expect to be doing strange
things to the source tree, now would be a _very_ good time to make a tarball
of the CVS source you just downloaded. Normally any time you wish to update
your source tree you should be able to cd back into the directory _above_ the
xc/ directory and reissue the exact same commands as above (it'll take awhile
to check your files against the files on the remote server, but _far_ less
time than downloading the whole thing again would), however for paranoia or
out of habit a tarball might be handy for being able to nuke the entire
source tree and restoring your copy of the source to a known state of sanity.
IV. Configuring the Build
-------------------------
While you can usually get away with skipping the creation of a a host.def
file to control the build process, this results in a very generic build not
very well matched to your system. Once you have read the appendices and
ensured that the prerequisites are installed properly in your system, cd to
the top level source directory (xc/) and then create a file called host.def
in the config/cf/ directory containing the following lines
-----88-----
You may wish to edit the last line a bit with respect to the -march argument
but for anyone on a pentium or better these lines will work fine. The
Has* directives are really all that's necessary to get XFree86 to use your
locally installed copies of the various libraries instead of building it's own
versions. The UseExpat directive is there to enable XFree86's use of the
expat library for handing various things. It appears that as long as expat
is present, XFree86 won't bother to use libxml2, but that may or may not be
entirely accurate. In any case, we definitely want to prevent XFree86 from
building it's own version of libxml2 by issuing the HasLibxml2 directive.
V. Compiling the Binaries
-------------------------
Once everything is ready, shake your rubber chicken over the monitor, cross
your fingers, and type:
make World 2>&1 | tee world.log
The build will take quite some time to complete, so be patient. I've been
told that if you have already built the package once, and changes to the
source tree have been made (if you're familiar with the output of CVS, make
a log of what happens when you update your source so you can see if/when these
happen), you can try using `make Everything` instead of `make World` to
execute a partial rebuild of the sources without having the build scripts
methodically obliterate everything that's already been compiled.
If you're lucky enough for it to get all the way to the end on the first
try, then congratulations are in order! If your build stops and complains
about undefined references to "inflate" or "deflate" then you need to re-read
the Appendices concerning how your library pre-requisites were installed. If
you get any other kind of errors, well... this is a beta release and is not
actually guaranteed to compile. Give it a few hours, re-run the cvs commands
to see if updates to the source tree have been made, and then try _a second
time_ before posting to a mailing list about it.
VI. Installing
--------------
Assuming everything compiled, now would be a good time to make backups of
your important files, extra fonts, app-default customizations, KDM/GDM config,
etc. You might also want to just make a backup of everything you're about
to delete on a CDR or something but that's up to you. The one thing you
should definitely now do is remove _all_ your old XFree86 files. This means
the following:
rm -rf /usr/X11R6 /usr/X11
rm -rf /var/X11R6 /var/X11
rm -rf /etc/X11
ldconfig
This way you will be certain to get a clean set of binaries that won't be
tripping over any leftovers from the previous install that might break things
for you. Now that the way has been paved for your new installation, from the
xc/ directory, enter:
make install &&
make install.man &&
ldconfig
If these should stop at some point and complain about something being
missing (this happened to me with two unclean builds) then you may have gotten
a few things built out of sequence, which is no real calamity. The first
thing you should try (which worked both times for me and shouldn't be likely
to be needed with a release tarball) is to simply cd into the subdirectory
where files are supposed to be missing and type just plain `make`. If it runs
for a little bit, building this and that, and then ends normally, cd back to
the top level xc/ directory and run `make install` again. If this doesn't
work, _then_ you can worry a little over it, but provided you have all the
requisites installed properly, you should have no problems whatsoever.
There is one last thing you must do, both for the sake of FHS-compliance and
to satisfy the whimsy of some archaic applications you might wish to compile.
You'll need to make some symlinks, using the commands below:
ln -sf /usr/X11R6/include/X11 /usr/include/X11
ln -sf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 /usr/lib/X11
ln -sf /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11
Now you can restore your fonts (although don't put anything new into the
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF directory!) and your app-defaults and your
xdm/gdm/kdm configuration files, and prepare to configure XFree86 using
whatever configuration utility you normally use to create a new configuration
file. As before, edit the FontPath directives to include where you installed
all your font files, but don't bother adding /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/TTF. As was
the case with 4.2.1, this directory seems to be hard-wired as one that is
always searched for fonts, and can save your bacon if something goes horribly
wrong when you install some new broken TrueType font of your own into the
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/TrueType directory.
VII. Configuration
------------------
After running your usual configuration tool (`xf86cfg`, or if that fails,
`xf86config` is always a reliable console-only fallback) the usual caveats
apply to things you may have to edit. You'll need to make sure the freetype
module isn't commented out by default in the new configuration file. You'll
still need to add the entries for your custom font directories in the FontPath
section. You may _also_ now need to edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and in the
top section add an entry for

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts for the new
Xft2/fontconfig stuff, but only that one extra entry is needed. Thankfully
this facility appears to search subdirectories without complaint. I would
also recommend you do _not_ uncomment the DontZap directive so you can
CTL-ALT-BKSP your way out of X if something goes wrong.
Now that you think you have everything installed and properly configured,
with whatever account you'd normally use from the text console, simply run
`startx` and see if things start like they're supposed to. Do not be alarmed
if you see a set of hideous green and white terminal windows and a clock
appear. On this first attempt you're just trying to make sure the display is
working properly--you won't be happy if you find a problem when the machine is
trying to boot to runlevel 4 or 5.
If you're wondering where the colored mouse pointers you've heard so much
about went to, apparently all those radical changes have scared the XFree86
devs, and to prevent rioting in the streets XFree86 once again defaults to
the plain black-with-white-outlines set of cursors. The new redglass and
whiteglass themes are still there, tho'. If you want them, add something akin
to the following line to your ~/.Xdefaults file:
Xcursor.theme: redglass
At the moment, redglass and whiteglass are the only two new themes that ship
with the new XFree86 (get cracking, Gimp fiends!) that are meant for CRT/LCD
displays, and some searching of the web should turn up any further details
about them you might need.
Provided you're satisfied with the way your display is working, you should
be able to reinstall GDM or KDM and switch your machine back to runlevel 4 or 5
now. Have fun!
APPENDICES
----------
Appendix A - zlib Library
-------------------------
XFree86 uses zlib compression for a number of things now. To this end with
a little work we can convince it to use the system's version of the zlib
library, both to prevent it from installing an unnecessary version of it's
own into /usr/X11R6/lib and to keep other programs from screwing up later if
your system happens to be using a different version of zlib than XFree86
does. LFS normally has you install a shared library version of zlib into
/usr, but just in case you missed it, here's the executive overview...
Get the zlib source for version 1.1.4 (current at the time of writing) from
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/zlib-1.1.4.tar.bz2. The md5sum for this
file should be ea16358be41384870acbdc372f9db152. Untar the package somewhere
and run the shell script below to compile and install it with relatively
standard optimizations. Note: The zlib authors have already spent quite a bit
of time worrying over optimizations at the assembly level. Change PKG_ARCH
and PKG_CPU if you like, but don't mess with the CFLAGS setting!
-----88-----
Appendix B - libxml2 Library
----------------------------
This library may actually not be necessary for XFree86 in light of it's
clear preference for the expat library, but numerous other things use it, and
we're very sensibly preventing XFree86 from building it's own version of this
library, so we might as well cover a proper way to build it.
Start by getting a copy of the source tarball for version 2.5.3 of libxml2
from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.4/libxml2-2.5.3.tar.bz2
which should have an md5sum of c2ee2c99309a732d0e9c32e530241012. If you are
planning on using Gnome, you will need Python installed (2.2.2 works fine for
me) _before_ you build this library, since it will install some python
bindings which apparently some programs need to build. For this reason we
are explicitly instructing the configure script to use both python and threads
and we will also do the self-tests as a sanity check. The time to find out
something is wrong with this library is _now_ instead of 15 packages later,
because more than just this library will have to be rebuilt if this is done
incorrectly the first time.
You can use the shell script below to compile and install libxml2 2.5.3.
Feel free to change the optimization levels to anything you'd like.
-----88-----
Appendix C - PNG Graphics Library
---------------------------------
This library is necessary because it's used by parts of XFree86 to generate
those pretty alpha-transparencied mouse cursors. Unfortunately at the moment
the latest release of the png library is _broken_ with respect to zlib, and
if you get any errors while building xcursorgen that mention undefined
references to inflate or deflate, this is why. You have two options: The
first option being to use libpng 1.2.4 (which doesn't have this brokenness)
and the second (preferable) option is to apply a temporary patch found at
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~sklein/libpng-1.2.5-lz.patch to the 1.2.5
source tree which should eliminate the problem. If by the time you are
building this 1.2.6 has been released, it will likely not be broken like this
and upgrading to it later is highly unlikely to have an adverse affect on
XFree86.
Get the source from http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.5.tar.bz2
(it's md5sum will report 3fc28af730f12ace49b14568de4ad934) and untar it
somewhere, and then use the following shell script to compile and install it
(after patching it, of course). This package, like zlib, has already been
analyzed at length at the assembly level by it's authors, and no extra
optimizations you may apply are likely to do you any good. Just be happy with
changing the PKG_ARCH and PKG_CPU settings.
-----88-----
Appendix D - Expat Library
--------------------------
This library is used by XFree86 for parsing configuration files (among other
things) and is apparently preferred over libxml2. Thankfully it is very
straightforward to build as well.
The latest version of the expat library is 1.95.6 and can be obtained from
http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-1.95.6.tar.gz. It should have an
md5sum of ca78d94e83e9f077b5da2bfe28ba986a.
Feel free to change the optimizations used in the shell script below when
you install expat although the defaults should work for nearly everyone.
-----88-----
Appendix E - Freetype2 Library
------------------------------
The Freetype2 library is used by Xft/Xft2 in XFree86 to render TrueType
fonts onto the display. Without it, you don't get TrueType fonts at all, let
alone any anti-aliasing for them. At the time of this writing, the latest
version of the Freetype2 library is 2.1.3, which is possibly the most advanced
version yet. Perversely, it has the simplest compilation method.
One of the more useful improvements is that now the library seems to be
doing a much better job of handling wob/bow-ness (white text on a black field
versus black text on a white field) issues with anti-aliasing much more
gracefully. In previous versions this caused anti-aliased text at small
font sizes to appear washed out and faded looking. Considering that most
TrueType fonts which contain glyphs that are accessed by enabling the patent-
encumbered bytecode interpreter are already biased towards black text on a
light background, these glyphs will now look even worse in comparison to
what you will get without the bytecode interpreter (this translates into what
should be an improvement for people using light text on a dark background).
I highly recommend that users no longer enable the bytecode interpreter.
One of the caveats of version 2.1.3 of the Freetype2 library is that if
you attempted to get it to use the system's version of the zlib library
instead of linking in it's own miniature version, the result is a library
which is _broken_ with respect to zlib in much the same way as libpng-1.2.4
was. Considering how small the size difference is (and that technically
calls to the shared zlib should take more time), the fact that this bug is
supposedly fixed in the cvs version of the library, and the trouble it would
take to work around it, it doesn't really make sense to attempt to turn
use this feature either. When the 2.1.4 version comes out which shouldn't
have this problem, users should be able to easily upgrade. (It's possible
that this might even be the default behaviour in the new version, which
would mean the shell script below would't need any alteration.)
You can get a copy of the source code for the 2.1.3 version of the library
from http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/freetype/freetype-2.1.3.tar.bz2 and it's
md5sum should be 09775a4111e066f782866d8a57d8481b. Untar it anywhere you
like and build it with the shell script below. You should be able to change
the optimizations used to anything you feel like.
-----88-----
One last note about the Freetype2 library... In the past, conflicting
versions of the library installed in /usr and /usr/X11R6 have caused problems
for some package authors which drove them to do unusual things to try to get
around them. One of the more inflexible ways that were attempted was to get
the freetype2 headers by forcing the compiler to search /usr/X11R6/include
alone for them, expecting to get Freetype 2.0.6/9. This _breaks_ when we
disable XFree86 building it's own version of the library. Considering that
old version of Freetype2 was broken to begin with, and 2.1.3 can handle the
function calls without any problems, if at some point in the future you have
problems building things that appear to be the result of this kind of madness,
(which plagued the wxWindows library for some time) you can use the following
shell script to put symlinks into /usr/X11R6 pointing to all the parts of
Freetype2 in /usr. This solves the problem and doesn't break anything in the
process.
---------->8----------
#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib &&
cd /usr/X11R6/lib
ln -s ../../lib/libfreetype.* .
mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/include &&
cd /usr/X11R6/include
ln -s ../../include/freetype2 .
ln -s ../../include/ft2build.h .
----------8